We visited a couple of botanic gardens on our trip and I’ve been fully won over to the cottage style, particularly in borders. Gardening has always been a mixed bag for us. We’ve generally done pretty well with container vegetables and have had raised beds in some form or fashion for a while. The trouble comes from keeping other stuff out of the raised beds. Our yard, such as it is, was formerly pasture. It’s green and nice from a distance, but up close it is a riotous jungle of stuff. This is good, and exactly what I want in greenery.

The problem is that a lot of the green stuff is bermuda grass, which makes a fabulous lawn but can only be really controlled by splitting an atom. It gets into everything. You go to pull out a small tuft in the raised bed and realize it’s connected to three feet of buried root, any particle of which can start growing an entire lawn by itself if left behind.

So I’ve surrendered the raised beds for now. My last gardening stand is the area along the front of the house. There’s a sidewalk between the yard and this area and I’ve been shifting to drought-hardy perennials and natives - stonecrop, coneflower, brown-eyed susans, and yarrow. I’ve transplanted some (butterfly weed and prickly pear) from other parts of the yard and am going to try my hand at propagating others (lavender, cat mint, and anise hyssop). One thing I’ll need to do is clear out a couple of overgrown oakleaf hydrangeas, and I’ll probably move a few of the perennial herbs from their containers into a spot or two. A sickly climbing rose has gotten the boot; I’m replacing it with a coral honeysuckle (‘Major Wheeler’) which should do well in the full sun/southern exposure and give the hummingbirds something to do.

I’m also attempting to rescue a few of the remaining strawberry plants from the raised bed catastrophe; if they make it, I’ll move them in as well to use as groundcover. Most of this area gets a brutal amount of sun, but there are a couple of small niches that stay in all-day shade. For those, I’ve moved a couple of maidenhair spleenwort ferns from our woody areas and will also take a look at pachysandra. I figure if the hostas can persist there, it’s shady enough. I am also, once again, trying to encourage the Virginia creeper to head up one of the brick walls.

The cottage style has been generally described as:

• controlled chaos
• tall in the back, short in the front
• favor natives as much as possible
• plant thick, allow spread, and let the plants fight it out
• keep opportunistic plants/weeds if they look nice and behave
• edibles throughout - herbs, berries, vegetables

I can get behind all of this, especially the controlled chaos bit.